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I'm sure the Tizen/Mer/KDE chaps would be more than happy to help them get a non-windows smartphone to market quickly.

I'd rather that than they approach Google, but both could only be a Good Thing for Nokia.

IIRC, google asked Nokia to make phone with Android on it, but Nokia refused. I don't remember the details. better googling for it

No, it all going _exactly_ as they planned, but by "they" I mean Elop and Ballmer.
Step 1: Switch to a shitty, way-behind OS nobody wants
Step 2: See your handsets rot in inventory
Step 3: Present very bad results and highlight the fact that you still make lots of money from patents
Step 4: Get bought for a pittance
Step 5: Seller breaks the once great company up and sells/keeps the good parts and lays off most of the people

We are at Step 3 now

I used to think that way, but now I'll call it conspiracy theory.. But lets see how far this 'Elop' riding company go..

And to think that smartphone OS didn't have copy-paste until 2010/2011? heheh.. What a modern OS.

Hard to tell. Recall that Microsoft is paying for much of the marketing.

No, Nokia will not die in 2012.

Maybe in 2013 if things keep going downhill. Or 2014 if things hit a plateau. Or never if things turn around.

That's because Q1 2012 was the first quarter in which Nokia took a substantial loss on phones. Q4 2011 was break-even. And now the loss for Q1 2012 was EUR 219 million. That's bad, but not yet disastrous.

Hidden behind the doom-and-gloom headline number of EUR 929 million is the fact that Nokia's losses are still being driven primarily by accounting writedowns. Specifically, the EUR 772 million writedown of Nokia Siemens Networks has absolutely nothing to do with how the phone division ("Devices and Services") performed. The writedown hit the balance sheet in 2012 -- but the money was actually wasted in 2006.

Once you learn to read a financial statement, you will have a much better idea of how companies are actually doing. And you will be stunned at how clueless the financial media actually is when it comes to finances.

Thank you for explaining that, it makes a lot more sense.

Yeah. It's a shame. I really like Nokia for their built quality. But, as most old man (old company that too stubborn/proud to change), they think It's OK if they operate with their success formulae.. That outdated..

That would depend on whether share holders do or don't mind to get rid of Nokia itself, ripping off some money in result. So far it seems they don't care about company's success.

Edited 2012-04-19 19:28 UTC

This is true. I guess we'll see over the next few months. Either Elop will be gone, or the asset striping will have begun.

His compensation is tied to the stock price.

But if I made as much as he does for failing I would still consider myself rich.

Adding Android to create a three-pronged strategy made perfect sense to me.

1. Keep touting Symbian at the low-end (now with Qt! - it's your cash cow, keep milking it for cash flow from its legions of fans).

2. Push Android for the mid-range market (and find a way for your carefully cultivated army of Qt developers to quickly port to / co-develop for Android's Dalvik, rewarding their loyalty and earning their trust).

3. Keep touting MeeGo for the high-end / technologist market (with a nice Dalvik run-time for the best of both worlds - MeeGo got rave reviews, runs Qt apps like Symbian, and geeks like me were absolutely salivating for it and would happily have paid iPhone-like premiums for quality MeeGo phones if it had a future).

All three were open source and a great fit for the Nokia culture and traditions, and would have given Nokia a play in over 70% of the smartphone market OSes. With their quality hardware and reputation, their future would have been secure.

A CEO would have to be a dolt to miss something this obvious. Oh, hello, Mr. Elop...

No, there are enough Android vendors around already without Nokia. Better they should put a better chip and run normal Linux on it, facilitate Wayland development and etc. Nokia was on that track but stumbled over MS money. They should just go back.

Sure, I'd like them to go that way too, but it would take alot more work, time and money than to go Android.
Plus they would have to build up an ecosystem from scratch. MeeGo was definitely on the right track, except for the name (Moblin was a far better name). But it's abandoned and doesn't have an ecosystem worth mentioning.
Android is the sane choice at the moment.
Besides, when I buy an Android phone, I don't just blindfolded pick any phone out of the bunch, I pick the phone I actually like. The hardware matters, and noone has made any handsets I like as much as the Nokia phones.
Samsungs phones are either too big, too plastic or both, plus I hate TouchWiz. HTCs phones are slightly better in that regard and the only choice I can tolerate right now (I have a Sensation), but they are still big and getting bigger. Nokias phones have a quality feeling to them, and especially the N9 is pretty much perfect in size and design.
The only things I don't really like with Android are the Ads that you have to unsubscribe to and the semi-closed nature of it (you're kinda stuck with TouchWiz/Sense and very long waits for upgrades).
I would like another alternative or for the Android vendors to actually push their drivers to the main tree, deliver vanilla Android on their handsets and cooperate for once.
But that won't happen and there simply aren't any other decent alternatives at the moment.

Check out the NITdroid project if you haven't, it's a beautiful glimpse of what android would've been like on the N9. I'm quite impressed with the snappiness of ICS on the device given the single-core processor and the alpha state of the port. The screen on the N9 puts most other ICS capable devices to shame, and the device itself, IMO, is way above *any* android phone out there when it comes to build quality and especially design.

Then again, being alpha, it is mostly for testing purposes, as using a smartphone sans camera, with wonky wi-fi/3G connectivity and no voice calls(!) isn't quite viable for everyday use, but it's fun to toy around with and dual-boots alongside meego, so I'd say give it a go. If nothing else - because you can ;-)

edit:Just re-read your post, realizing you don't actually own an N9; my advice then would be to keep an eye on NITdroid and jump ship if/when they reach RC or actual release. Then again, that's probably so far in the future that newer, more advanced, and who knows, maybe even more desirable devices will have launched :-)

Edited 2012-04-19 22:30 UTC

Very very nice. That is exactly what I would want.

For my next phone, I'd like the N9 size and design but with a faster chip and vanilla Android. If only it could happen.
If the N9 had a dual-core chip, I would have probably chased around the world to get my hands on one, just so I could install ICS on it once a port had matured.

Edit: here's to hoping that in 6-12 months, there will be a phone of similar size and great design, with a fast chip, true RGB 720p AMOLED screen and vanilla Android. It could happen, right? right? hello? this thing on?

Edited 2012-04-19 22:50 UTC

for a pure android (i admit the phone is not by far as nicely designed as N9) you can go with Nexus / Nexus S phones. I own a Nexus S phone (single core 1 ghz, 512 ram) and with 4.0.4). It's fast, really fast, comfortable in hand (it however has that plastic feel to it) and android 4 without any other "thing" on top of it it's really easy and fast to navigate.

Yeah, I've wanted a Nexus phone ever since I "discovered" Sense.. However, although I do like the software on the Nexus phones, I'm not that impressed with the size or feel of the handset itself.
Nokia N9 Nexus = droool..